Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet caught up with Tulsa King’s latest Season 3 episode, “The Fifty,” via Paramount+ subscription, so be warned!
Tulsa King’s third season is already a blast, with not just one but two high-ranking threats clouding up any future endeavors he’s planning for the 2025 TV schedule . There’s James Russo’s mob boss Quiet Ray Renzetti, who didn’t take kindly to Dwight’s solo venturing, and there’s Robert Patrick’s Jeremiah Dunmire, who doesn’t seem like he’ll be taking kindly to anything Dwight’s crew gets invested in. Case in point: Episode 302 had me stressing the hell out each time Patrick and Stallone shared the screen.
Having previously costarred in 1997’s Cop Land, the two actors have never faced off on opposing sides of a narrative in the same way that things are going down on Tulsa King, and I have to say, it was worth the wait in every way. From the early showdown at Theodore Montague’s wake — “This business requires sound judgment, not the foul hand of a bottom-feeder.” — to their late-ep sit-down, ever second of the two actors squaring off is electric. It’s just another reason why Tulsa King is one of Paramount+’s best shows.
When I talked to Sylvester Stallone ahead of Season 3’s debut, I asked him about working with the iconic Terminator 2 co-star, and Sly paid him something akin to the ultimate compliment by saying:
Well, yeah, you know Robert Patrick…it’s something, it’s a gift you’re born with. You could go to acting class your whole life, and I don’t dissuade people from wanting to do that, but you either have it or you don’t.
Stallone made it pretty clear that he believes Patrick was indeed born with it, and has been showing it off on screen for many decades now. Wildly enough, this isn’t even the only current streaming action-drama co-starring Frank Grillo that features the actor as a backwoodsy villain. He’s also currently adding to the evil over on Peacemaker, though nobody else on that show is as formidable a nemesis for him as Stallone.
The Expendables star continued, saying that Robert Patrick brought his own personal flourishes to playing Jeremiah Dunmire:
When Robert came in in that outfit, that hat and that look, I thought, ‘I’m on a time machine. This is like 150 years ago.’ Like modern going against the classic hold. I just thought juxtapositioning us side by side, that’s brilliant. That’s him. I didn’t tell him to do that. He figured that whole look out himself.
Indeed, for all that we’ve seen Dwight Manfredi standing up to a bunch of other mob underlings who were clearly cut from the same Italian cloth, the Dunmires bring a more southern-fried flavor to Tulsa King‘s lineup of antagonists. (Oh, Neal McDonought’s Thresher is still out there, of course, but he’s not on the same level at all.)
Sylvester Stallone Talks Getting Into The Right Headspace For Intense Scenes
The final scene’s conversation between Dwight and Jeremiah definitely got my blood pressure boiling, with Mitch getting ambushed also adding to the turmoil. So I had to ask the Rocky icon if he had a process for getting into the right mental space for scenes like that where threats are being bandied about. He agreed, but then shared why it’s harder than one might expect to get into that stressed-out mindset, saying:
You do. I do, I do. I mean, I sit there and I start to rewind what we’ve done previously. That’s the biggest, hardest thing that a lot of people don’t realize: we’re jumping scenes. Nothing is flowing contiguously. It’s taking the ending first, and the first, make that last. Pffsh. I mean, it’s hard.
For example, if Robert Patrick was only on the set for two weeks, and the crew had to film all of his scenes smashed together, that would create a lot of timeline havoc for the actors, as they’d need to constantly stay on top of tracking the plotline and what their characters would be feeling from one moment to the next. Maybe not so hard for minor characters, but quite difficult for someone who’s on screen for 80% of every episode.
Granted, the example above wasn’t exactly what was happening here, but that doesn’t mean all the scenes were filmed in sequential order. Locations, times of day and other factors also play into why productions shoot scenes out of order. Whatever the reason, even a longtime pro like Sylvester Stallone still has to keep his head straight on the set.
Tulsa King streams new episodes on Paramount+ every Sunday, with eight more stress-filled episodes on the way.